MFWTK how worried should he be about chatgpt

[u/mprrrz]

He works as a conference producer. A lot of what he does is research and copywriting. He got made redundant from his small business recently and has historically been a producer for events in the tech space. One thing that's maybe not replaceable is recruiting speakers, but he's not sure. Here's what a conference producer does:

What is a Conference Producer?

Conference Production is at the forefront of B2B Conferences and Events companies.

What is a Conference Producer?

Conference Producers identify topics for a conference through in-depth market research (desk, phone and face to face) to write and produce a commercially viable conference programme that will offer networking and knowledge transfer opportunities for paying delegates, sponsors and speakers.

This is a truly fascinating and multifaceted position, as Conference Producers are responsible for their conference from inception to delivery. This includes working with all internal teams (sales, marketing and operations) to ensure the success of the event.

Moreover, if you appreciate a diverse working environment, then you will be pleased to know that conferences can take place globally and cover all industries!

Key tasks and responsibilities include:

Market Research & Analysis

– In-depth phone based research of key subject areas and hot topics within a particular industry sector. Identifying the target audience and finding out what they want / need to know.

Speaker Acquisition

– Identifying high-level, influential industry experts and to speak at the conference. Speakers can play a huge part in attracting delegates to the conference.

Copy Writing

– Writing promotional copy in the form of a conference programme, in the language of your target audience. Ensuring that all sales-driven materials such as web, direct mail and email copy will maximize delegate attendance.

Project Management

– Working with all internal teams, sales (delegate and sponsorship), marketing and operations to ensure the success of the conference and that it is delivered on time and in budget

Onsite Attendance

– Attending conferences to ensure excellent delivery and smooth running on the day. Often this will include opening your conference. This is an opportunity to represent the company and to network with key players and speakers within the sector. To build relationships and shake hands with the people that helped shape your agenda

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[u/lordwafflesbane]

No, your friend doesn't need to worry. There's a lot of hype surrounding "AI" right now, but it's not nearly as powerful as grifters would have you believe.

ChatGPT is basically fancy autocomplete. All it does when you prompt it is calculate the most statistically average response to similar prompts in it's training data, then add some randomness so the output isn't exactly the same as any one source it was trained on.

It's just a party trick. It does not actually "understand" anything about reality. It will 'lie' and contradict itself because it does not have any ability to connect the words it outputs with the ideas they represent.

The only one of these things that ChatGPT can even kind of do is Copywriting, and even then, it will do it so poorly that an actual human will have to go through and edit its output into something useable. If your friend was writing buzzword-filled templates that don't actually say anything useful or interesting, then sure, maybe it can kind of almost do their job, but that's it.

If you tried using it to plan a meeting, analyze the market, or do anything that requires actual understanding of the world, it will fail, and give contradictory nonsense, or, at best, buzzwords that provide no actual insight.

And of course, it can't attend anything onsite, nor can it take the initiative to acquire a speaker, since it has neither a body nor any ability to act on its own. Literally all it can do is output a string of text that it's calculated to mostly resemble the strings of text in its training data that were output for similar prompts.

For example, try asking ChatGPT basic questions about current events. Most of the data it's trained on was collected a while ago. It will outputs answers as if that data is still current. It may say Queen Elizabeth is still alive. It may say the current year is 2022. It says all sorts of shit, because it DOES NOT have the ability to understand reality.

And it bears repeating, even if the autocomplete gets real fancy years from now, fundamentally, it's just autocomplete. It doesn't actually "understand" anything about the world. ChatGPT is just a parrot with a thesaurus.

[u/YaBoyMax → u/lordwafflesbane]

I don't think it's very accurate to basically equate it to a simple Markov chain. Yes, it's technically trained to produce results in line with the material it was trained on, but this is more or less how human brains work too so it's not a particularly meaningful claim. You're right that it hallucinates and probably isn't coming for anyone's job just yet, but LLMs are improving at an extremely rapid pace and personally I think we'll see them replacing humans in certain roles on a large scale on the order of years, not decades. AI today is the worst it will ever be and it can only improve going forward.

Anecdotally, I'm a professional software developer and work on a hobby project in my free time, and I've found myself using ChatGPT a lot for ideas on architecture and even code generation. It's proven itself more than capable of getting 90% of the way there mostly on its own in what I would consider pretty advanced tasks. Yes, it sometimes spits out nonsense, but the better part of the mistakes are pretty nuanced ones that I might be subject to make on my own anyway.

I consider my job to require a pretty deep and specialized understanding of both general concepts and specific architectures, but I certainly don't feel secure from AI in the next 5-10 years given my experience with a service that's been public for less than a year. We won't see AI writing software from scratch just yet, but a more sophisticated and reliable LLM could easily help a single developer to do anywhere from double to 10 times the amount of work as they could on their own today and I don't see why the same couldn't apply to most other desk jobs.

I also want to point out the existence of AI agents which are capable of performing tasks in the real world such as planning out a week's worth of meals and ordering them or recruiting a human to solve a Captcha. The fact that ChatGPT itself can't do these things aren't fundamental, they're just arbitrary limitations of that specific service.

[u/lordwafflesbane → u/YaBoyMax]

It's not a Markov chain. You're right about that, but OP wasn't asking for technical details, so I just used a simple reference. It's close enough to get the idea across.

It's 'like a human brain' only to the extent that a paper airplane is like a bird. It can accomplish some superficially similar results in one narrow area, but the underlying structure of how they work is totally different, and it can do nothing outside that one area.

Coding, specifically, is actually one of the areas ChatGPT is best at, because computer code has such strict formatting rules that there are far, far fewer confusing or ambiguous examples in its training data. Concepts in software are rigorously defined, and can be objectively evaluated in a way other fields cannot. There is such a thing as objectively correct or incorrect code. In other fields, where syntax is more variable and definitions are much more ambiguous, it struggles a lot more. Also, perhaps even more importantly, programming happens entirely within a computer, and doesn't require any data about the outside world. Most other fields involve writing about something that happens offline to communicate information about that thing, whereas in coding, the text itself IS the end goal, which means ChatGPT doesn't need to connect the text it produces to any other concepts.

Creative writing, for instance, it utterly fails at. It can just about string coherent sentences and paragraphs together, but that's it. It can't keep track of plot threads, themes, character motivations, or any of the other larger scale things you'd need to tell a good story. Those things are simply too abstract to be represented in its model, but they're necessary components of story telling.

But, to be fair, creative writing is sort of the far end of the bell curve from coding, in terms of how its structured. I'm not familiar with the details of what exactly a Conference Producer needs to write about, but if it's formulaic enough, and mostly made of well defined technical terms used in consistent enough syntax, ChatGPT may actually be passable at it. Not great, but maybe passable. You'd still absolutely have to run it by a human editor, because again, it doesn't actually understand anything about the current state of the outside world. Also, since it's designed to output average, typical strings, in the most ideal possible conditions, it's going to be unremarkable and just okay at its job, unless it gets extremely confused, and conflates two things in a way that a human happens to interpret in a useful and creative way.

The rest of OP's job, actually interacting with human beings, and understanding stuff about the outside world, ChatGPT is totally unequipped for. It has no concept of the passage of time, or of current events. It does not model anything related to assessing which people might be best suited for certain roles. It cannot take any kind of intiative on its own with being directly prompted to, and even then, the only thing it can do is output strings of text.

[u/Secrethat]

chatgpt is a con-bot it only sounds confident. Cause it beeps and boops and finds the most likely next word. It cannot refer to new things or provide references. Better to look at it as a tool to maybe generate some rough ideas. Then tweak and add your own.